Consolation Prize

Although I’ve been back from my travels for a few weeks now (for those that weren’t aware I’ve been to Whistler, Canada, to try and improve my limited Snowboarding skills) I have still not had the urge to boot up the Xbox 360, PS3, or DS, and immerse myself in our electronic pastime.

Unfortunately, a direct consequence of my general listlessness and disillusionment towards videogames is that the blog writing suffers. There’s no point in denying it, I don’t have vast repertoire of articles parked ready for publishing to tide me over, nor a great deal to write about once my muse has been unceremoniously dumped in the binary wasteland. And thus the blog has been barren ever since - a fact that I feel I need to apologise for.

However, not everything lasts forever, and fortunately the desire to play a game is starting to manifest itself. Instead of just deciding to pick up whatever “hot” game is generating the most discussion, pick up the latest release, or play through numerous demo’s that are of no interest, I thought it would be worth examining my back catalog to decide what game to play next. The hope is to avoid the need to rush through a game as fast as possible to voice my thoughts, and instead take my time, savour the experience, and learn to love games again.

With this in mind I’ve drawn up a shortlist of games that have piqued my interest, but due to various circumstances never had the time to play them.

Okami (Wii)

This respected swansong from Clover Studios is at some point or other always at the forefront of my back-catalogue. It is perhaps the only game I’ve actually purchased twice. Once when it first appeared on the PS2, and then again when it was ported to the Wii by Ready at Dawn.

I find myself looking wondrously at the watercolour inspired graphical style whenever I see images of this game, and the various references I read with regards to its Zelda-esque game design only cause to enhance its appeal. I’m curious to see how well “Celestial Brush”, a unique design feature of Okami to draw images on the screen canvas for use in combat and puzzle solving, translates to the “Wii-mote”. It should in theory be a perfect match, although I’ve heard comments to the contrary.

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I can quite easily lose myself in Fallout 3. Happily immersing myself for hours at a time concerned only with the adventures of the lone wanderer and not worrying about real world stimulus - like the need to eat and drink. However, there always comes a point where you have to decide that enough is enough, it’s time to move onto other games, and this was the case a few weeks ago as I left my companions Dogmeat and Fawkes to fend for themselves. I knew I would be back at some point, and Operation Anchorage provides the perfect excuse to journey back into the Capitol Wasteland.

Operation Anchorage is the first of a trio of planned downloadable content from Bethesda to be sequentially followed up by the forthcoming The Pitt and Broken Steel. The new content fits in seamlessly with the existing lore of the game, and is best viewed as a side quest – albeit a fairly large one. It does however at least provide some welcome relief from the irradiated wasteland, swapping the desolate nuclear blasted landscape for the barren and frozen vistas of Alaska via the wonders of virtual reality simulator that has been unearthed by a group of Brotherhood of Steel outcasts.

The simulator is where you, the lone wanderer, fit into the equation. The outcasts have been unable to complete the simulator missions in order to gain access to the technology locked behind the associated vault. As the envious owner of a PIP Boy 3000, you’re able to interface with the simulator and enter the virtual world, complete the tasks therein, and as a reward get a percentage of the loot found behind the reinforced vault doors.

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Too Human is an unusual game to play. Not from the perspective of its genre, as it could be catogorised as a futuristic action RPG dungeon crawler, but in the way that it requires a serious investment of both time and energy in order to fully understand how to play the game and enjoy its full potential.

I’ve not played a game in a long while where I’ve been left feeling completely confounded by a game. It was only through determination - and gritted teeth - that the veil of fog clouding my comprehension of its mechanics began to lift. Only now, after completion, do I feel like I’m starting to get a handle on some of the peculiarities surrounding Too Human.

Finally I’ve grasped how light and dark “polarity” enemies’ work. Virtually impregnable to either melee strikes or ballistic attacks the correct type of attack must be used against these opponents otherwise they’ll benefit from whatever you throw at them. It sounds like a simple rule but as it’s not explained in depth (correct me if I’m wrong) it led to many frustrating encounters where I was slaughtered by these seemingly invulnerable opponents. It was only through enabling the damage meter that I could spot these enemies and witnessed my ballistic attacks having a negligible effect. Thus I needed to switch to an alternative strategy - melee where ballistic resistance was obvious - to dispatch the numerous hordes.

Discovering how to use the dodge manoeuvre effectively is a key skill in Too Human. Not only in the literal sense that it gets the character out of the way of incoming projectiles, but also in the fact that while dodging your character will have a few frames of invulnerability, which if timed correctly will help avoid any knockdown effects from area attacks. Again, this is another aspect that isn’t taught, but learned through trial and error - and numerous deaths. It’s a revelation when you realise those Troll hammer attacks and ground pounds are not to be feared after all.

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Continuing a series of articles looking at games which have left a memorable impression in my life, in this post I’ll be looking at the seminal classic RPG game Dungeon Master from FTL Games. First released to critical acclaim for the Atari ST (1987) and subsequently ported to a host of other platforms, but of most importance to me was the Amiga version (1988).

The Holy Grail

I first remember seeing this game running on an Atari ST roundabout the year of its release. Back in those days I lived and breathed fantasy worlds; whether it was playing Dungeons & Dragons, watching fantasy movies, or burying my head in a novel I was always on the lookout for new and interesting worlds which would feed my imagination.

Dungeon Master epitomised my perfect fantasy dungeon. It looked stunning and oozed an evocative atmosphere just as if it had been lifted directly from the minds of Dungeons & Dragons creators Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Here before me was an impressively realistic digital 3D dungeon using a first person perspective and all played in real-time, unlike most other RPG games at that juncture which were typically more turn-based affairs.

Unfortunately the Atari ST in question belonged to a friend’s older brother and access to the game was severely restricted to the occasional glance, or a few tense moments whenever the opportunity arose to sneak into said brother’s room. It would be another few years before I finally got the chance to play through the game completely when I eventually cobbled together enough money to purchase a Commodore Amiga 500. At last the quest was on!

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The development of Too Human from Silicon Knights seems to have been plagued by numerous obstacles along its nine year treacherous path to release. First conceived as a Playstation game (1999), then finding a home on Nintendo’s Gamecube (2000), and finally shifting residence to the Xbox 360 (2005). And then there was that little dispute with Epic Games’ over support of its “Unreal Engine 3”, resulting in Silicon Knights resorting to the development of there own game engine. All-in-all it’s actually a miracle Too Human is finally going to be released and didn’t get stuck in development hell or sent to Silicon Heaven.

Too Human is a third person action-adventure RPG game which takes its inspiration from Norse Mythology and weaves it into a game-world with cybernetically enhanced humans, cyberspace, and machine like foes. The player jumps into the role of Baldur, one of the Aesir, a god to the normal humans, and one of the protectors of mankind.

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Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom is a fantasy third person hack and slash action role playing game. A demo of the game is now available from Xbox Live Marketplace and is a rather chunky 1.2GB download.

According to the written prologue, which you can view if you’re really desperate, the world was once ruled by a pair of deities, Nible the lord of light, and Encablossa the lord of darkness. Each lord would take it in turns to rule and shape the world as they see fit and then after an age had passed hand over the reigns of power. However as is usual someone always gets fed up with the arrangement, in this case Nible throws his toys out of the pram and refuses to hand power back to Encablossa, thus igniting a war between the forces of light and darkness.

Upon starting the demo you can choose from one of two selectable characters. The final version of the game features six characters but in this instance you can play as either Leinhart an assassin, or Kendal the paladin. As you’d expect each character has strengths and weaknesses and specific weapons and armour types are only available to certain characters.

There are quite a few controls to get your head round in KUF:CoD but the demo will walk you through both the controls and item management. Different weapons can be assigned to both the “A” and “X” buttons whilst “B” and the right trigger are used for special abilities and the two shoulder buttons reserved for item assignment. Although this kind of configuration allows easy access to attacks, abilities and items as with most RPG’s item management forms an essential part of the game and you will frequently have to re-assign buttons as you find better equipment or learn new abilities. The tutorial can be skipped at any point but it’s worthwhile putting up with it the once before deciding to head off into the unknown world.

Any kind of attack, whether it be melee, ranged, or the use of an ability will cost “SP” points to perform. Your character has a total number of “SP” points available indicated by a blue bar at the bottom of the screen but once depleted the character will no longer be able to attack or use abilities. Although the SP bar does replenish fairly quickly (or via potions) having depleted can leave you vulnerable to attack for a period of time. This is compounded by your characters complete inability to block any type of attack.

Along the linear path that your character travels “idol sanctuaries” will be found. At these locations the player can buy, sell or synthesise items together. Alternatively you can choose to sleep and enter the dream world, a place where you can learn new abilities and discover more about the characters and the story.

KUF:CoD looks quite good. The demo environments all look OK and the main character models are decent enough but there is a lot of screen tearing throughout. Unfortunately I found the AI to be very poor with groups of enemies standing around and quite happily ignoring the player until trigger points are crossed. Similarly when fleeing to a previously cleared area enemies will only pursue you so far and will suddenly break off and return to there original stating location.

The camera is frustratingly poor, needs constant attention, and will frequently get obscured by a bush, tree or other object whilst fighting large groups of enemies. By holding down the left trigger you can change the camera to an aiming view. However this view seems rather pointless because although I could see a group of enemies and fire at them they were invulnerable until a trigger point was crossed. Once triggered the group would be upon you in seconds leaving only enough time to loose off a couple of ranged attacks.

On a positive point the game has a wealth of equipment and special abilities with which to customize your character. Levelling up a characters hit points, sp points, and luck works quite well with a pot of “attribute” points that allocated how the player sees fit.

I wouldn’t say that KUF:CoD is a terrible game, just average. It does quite a few things competently enough but there are some key areas in the demo that it falls down on, not the least of which is that it is repetitive. If you’re a fan of hack “n” slash RPG games then it’s worth giving the demo a cursory glance.

Mass Effect was released last week and I’m about ten hours into the game at the present. Overall I’m really enjoying the game but it’s a love-hate relationship. There are so many things that feel so right about the game, but on the other hand there are a few annoying glitches that get on my nerves.

The feeling of playing in a Sci-Fi space opera is spot on. So far the bits of the galaxy I’ve explored are very well detailed and the amount of work that
Bioware have invested in the history, the alien species, culture and technology is notable. New information when discovered appears in the “codex” (an in-game encyclopedia) and although not all of it is essential reading it provides the “icing on the cake” (which is not a lie!) of a well rounded game universe.

The game looks great, even fantastic most of the time but unfortunately it’s let down by frequent texture “pop-in” which you can’t help but notice, and the occasional bout of frame rate stutter.

As you’ve no direct control over individual team members and can only issue team orders like “follow”, “move to location”, or “take cover” the AI of your team members is very important. Sometimes I’ve felt it has been lacking in this department, resulting in team members standing still in the open and taking fire rather than finding cover. I’ve even had times where they’ve got stuck behind objects until you notice he/she/it has been left behind and return to point them in the right direction.

For me “Mass Effect”, at present, is a flawed gem. I’m happy to continue exploring the known universe but you can’t help but feel like the game has been released a little too early just to ensure it’s available for the Christmas market.